Public Nuisances
Tyrell, R. Emmett Jr.
"Public Nuisances" IN A CHAMPAGNE MOOD —WASHINGTON— right, so my sanguine commentary on Campaign 2002 has been proved wrong. "My hunch," I mistakenly wrote two weeks before Election Day, "is that enough seats...
...I heard him speak at the portrait unveiling for Judge Laurence Silberman...
...It has rallied to its side some of the country's most renowned academics, all-stars in the Pulitzer Prize lineup—Harvard's Doris Kearns Goodwin and Mount Holyoke's Joseph Ellis, the late Stephen Ambrose, Professor Louis W. Roberts of the State University at Albany in New York, and David Brock...
...The speaker was Supreme Court Justice Clarence BLIC B Y R . E M M E T Thomas...
...but I am washing it down with champagne, Pol Roger...
...Ellis was suspended for a year for lying to his students about his service in the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and his high school football career...
...Truth be known, such practices are part of a new intellectual movement that dazzles—the New Charlatans...
...Thus far, though, Columbia University has stood by him, notwithstanding evidence that has been in the public domain for well over a year...
...Actually the three were dead...
...This is a very troubling development...
...IN A CHAMPAGNE MOOD —WASHINGTON—1 A 1 right, so my sanguine commentary on Campaign 2002 has been proved wrong...
...I wonder how Rainey accounted for the rise of Justice Thomas...
...Now, however, an academic panel, composed of scholars from Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Chicago, has reviewed Arming America and accused Professor Bellesiles of "unprofessional and misleading work," and of crossing over "into the realm of falsification...
...Think of cold war revisionism or Critical Legal Studies—out in California, was there not a Department of Literature propounding Nudism...
...For thirty-seven years, Rainey and racists like him have been watching their segrega76 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 1ISANCES ' Y R R E L L, J R. tionist vision of the world evanesce as blacks have moved up into the middle class and on to some of the highest positions in American life...
...I was almost as far off as McAuliffe and Carville and Clinton—either Clinton...
...Well, so what...
...He spent the rest of his days as a security guard in a supermarket and at a shopping mall...
...After all, I was right in predicting that President George W. Bush would gain congressional seats...
...It even won the prestigious Bancroft Prize for history from Columbia University...
...To which he has responded by tendering his resignation to Emory, saying he "cannot continue to teach in what I feel is a hostile environment...
...Justice Thomas is too sensitive not to be wounded by the slanders, but he remains cheerful and unbowed...
...Over the next few weeks, as the nation clamored for news of their whereabouts, Sheriff Rainey offered: "They're just hiding out somewhere and trying to get a lot of publicity out of it...
...So here I am before you, eating humble pie...
...American universities have for years been open to new ideas, new intellectual movements...
...The unedifying spectacle of the New Jersey Supreme Court denying a Republican candidate certain victory by changing the rules in midcontest is yet another example of a corrupt party in action...
...Doubtless in the dank holes where the racists of yesteryear brood, many still believe a colorblind society is a Gomorrah...
...Now the president's allies will control the Senate Judiciary Committee, and perhaps his gentlemanly tone will replace that of the devious Senator Patrick Leahy, a man whose demonstrated contempt for good manners, good government, and the Bill of Rights has left the federal judiciary enfeebled by vacancies...
...These Democrats have lost the electorate'strust...
...Nine men were convicted, including Rainey's deputy Cecil R. Price and a Klan leader...
...That dangerous condition will now end...
...Call this, if you will, an academic reign of terror...
...Like retired Russian apparatchiks, they rattle around believing that the world has taken a dreadful turn down a dark road...
...For exercising his freedom of thought he has been abominated by the career civil rights mountebanks...
...WASHINGTON oes the sudden resignation of Professor Michael Bellesiles from Emory University signify a modification in university values...
...Good-win resigned from the Pulitzer board after acknowledging that earlier published work included passages filched without attribution...
...The ethical standards the corporate cads followed were those of Bill Clinton, a man famed for his impudent deceits and for commissions of perjury and contempt of court...
...Resorting to plagiarism, false documentation, and general prevarication, the New Charlatans build on what remains one of the jewels of recent academic thought, Deconstructionism...
...My mistake—Republicans now have a two-seat Senate majority, and possibly will pick up another in Louisiana's December runoff...
...Their bodies were discovered in an earthen dam on August 4. In early 1965 Rainey and seventeen others were tried on federal charges...
...Clarence Thomas is...
...Rainey was a rural Southern sheriff implicated in one of the most contemptible episodes of the 1960s, the disappearance and murder of three young civil rights workers: Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, both white and from New York City...
...As things stand now, the Coogler Commit-tee has a better record for respecting standards than the Pulitzer Committee...
...His laugh is one of the most musical instruments in Washington...
...And now I have to wobble off with my bottle of Pol Roger and meditate on how I got the election so wrong...
...We suffered a vile terrorist attack on September 11, 2001...
...Saddam's truculence, North Korea's cavalier rebuilding of its nuclear weapons program, and the brutal Washington sniper attacks intensified Americans' growing sense of vigilance...
...In both New Jersey and Minnesota, the Democrats moved from their proclaimed pieties about campaign finance reform to attempting to end campaigns altogether, or at least short-en them to their favor...
...Columbia would not want to obstruct that...
...Conceivably, his views were similar to the publicly stated views of the Reverend Jesse Jackson—another fearful symmetry that...
...They may well be the wave of the future...
...Roberts resigned after accusations that he plagiarized from others scholars, representing more than fifty pages of Latin translations as his own...
...But the bullies were routed...
...CHARLATANS' PROGRESS NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 77...
...Like the segregationists of yore, he apparently believes that blacks should "know their place...
...On June 21, 1964, they were jailed in Neshoba County, Mississippi, on a speeding violation—a civil rights worker did not have to drive very fast in those days to get stopped...
...On Election Day they put their trust in a president who has demonstrated the will to more than "wag the dog...
...He thinks for himself...
...Only Larry Kudlow, writing in the Washington Times (the Good Times), shared my optimism—hats off, Larry...
...It argues that with the printed word there is no such thing as certainty or truth...
...The electorate is tired of their bully tactics and suspicious of their habit of playing fast and loose with ethics and the law...
...and James Chaney, a black from Meridian...
...Indeed, the fact that so many distinguished scholars have been revealed as plagiarists and hoaxers suggests that throughout academe—and especially in the humanities where so-called truth is so easily politicized—many New Charlatans are at work...
...They tried to make "corporate ethics" an issue, but the electorate understood that the party of Clinton has no claim on ethics...
...Now scholars fromthree venerable universities are saying that the publication of "misleading work" and "falsification" are somehow reprehensible...
...When he failed to produce the probate records and gave spurious explanations, they accused him of deception...
...America is moving toward the colorblind free society that Martin Luther King, Jr...
...They claimed that Professor Bellesiles made up probate records from the eighteenth century, supposedly showing that very few guns were bequeathed in the wills of early Americans, and that what weapons were handed down were typically rusty heir-looms...
...In the past one hundred years the White House's triumph from incumbency has been replicated only three times...
...I know of no better rounded man...
...All television's gabbing heads the weekend before the election entered into a dirge, predicting Republican losses and a Democratic majority in the Senate...
...At Yale Law School his thoughts followed a radical course...
...Jesse Jackson is not as evil a man as Sheriff Rainey, but he is not a very good man—and it is increasingly apparent that he is not a friend of civil rights...
...Moreover, the American people are famous for their sense of fair play...
...Then there is Justice Thomas...
...He still believed: kapitalism doomed, democracy a sham...
...There were other speakers, all very distinguished and eloquent, but none spoke so eloquently and learnedly as this black justice, who had been raised in poverty in Sheriff Rainey's rural South...
...It reminded the citizenry of prior attacks Americans suffered beyond our shores in the 1990s, attacks that the government treated lightly...
...A speech I had heard at the District of Columbia Circuit Court House about the time Rainey was breathing his last made my reflections all the more poignant...
...For my part I shall have nothing to do with this harassment...
...Stephen Ambrose was castigated for lifting lines from other writers...
...Jesse Jackson denounces black conservatives for arriving at positions that blacks are not sup-posed to take...
...As life went on he adopted conservative principles...
...There is even talk that Professor Bellesiles may have his Bancroft Prize taken away...
...They were released in the late afternoon and drove off into the night, never to be seen alive again...
...Equally consequential in Campaign 2002 was the president's gentlemanly tone...
...As Robert L. Bartley, editor of the Wall Street journal, remarked apres the vote, "The big story is that voters have in a big way repudiated the McAuliffe-Carville-Clinton smash-mouth politics...
...envisaged and Sheriff Rainey execrated...
...Professor Bellesiles is the author of Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture...
...COLORBLIND WASHINGTONread in the New York Times's obituary columns of the death of a long-forgotten figure from America's civil rights struggle, Lawrence A. Rainey, a disgraced sheriff from Meridian, Mississippi...
...Various ominous events have put the American voter in a vigilant mood...
...Arguing that early Americans, even on the frontier, rarely possessed guns, and that gun ownership today is based on a myth that guns were always a part of American life, the book was widely celebrated by progressives when it was published two years ago...
...Most likely the civil rights workers had been murdered after leaving Rainey's jail...
...Professor Bellesiles's critics went on to claim that much of his evidence was bogus or willfully misinterpreted...
...It is always given for the Worst Book of the Year...
...One of their most blatant acts has been their treatment of White House judicial nominees, some of whom have had their good names sullied for life by charges of racism and perfidy...
...Progressives had leaped on the book as evidence, once again, that traditional ideas of America's past are hogwash...
...No professor that I know of has been asked to leave a university for being a Deconstructionist...
...Yet things are not going well for the New Charlatans...
...He really was serious when he came to Washington promising to "change the tone," and the American people favor the change...
...His death elicited reflections on how far America has come since his fleeting notoriety in 1964...
...I think I was also right in October when I laid down my reasons for a forthcoming Bush victory...
...I read an interview some years ago with a retired Soviet pooh-bah...
...Contrary to his detractors, he has a first-rate mind, a fine sense of the law, and character of the finest mettle...
...We have no plans to rescind it...
...And how much trust can one place in a party whose national chairman, the night of his historic defeat, tells Larry King, "Tonight was a good night for the Democrats...
...My hunch," I mistakenly wrote two weeks before Election Day, "is that enough seats will actually go to the Republicans to give them a one-seat majority in the Senate...
...Anyone familiar with the taunts of Nazis and Communists recognizes the effrontery...
...Is the academy turning its back on change, on Progress...
...Rainey himself was acquitted, but history was moving fast...
...At THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR I sit on the committee that gave Arming America the 2001 J. Gordon Coogler Award...
...Shortly after publication, scholars—mainly reactionaries, I presume—began questioning the book's research...
Vol. 35 • November 2002 • No. 6
